Orality, Literacy, and Their Discontents

ions and restore the text to voice and time. I don't see any problem in this. But there is no need to be especially tender toward the culture of literacy: it has given us some of the greatest works of literature we know, but it has also been turned to sinister purpose. L?vi-Strauss has claimed that "the only phenomenon with which writing has always been con This content downloaded from 207.46.13.126 on Sat, 24 Sep 2016 05:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ORALITY, LITERACY, AND THEIR DISCONTENTS 157 comitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes." The primary function of written communication, he argues, is "to facilitate slavery."14 That claim may be exorbitant. You may recall that Derrida has questioned, in the Grammatology, L?vi Strauss 's version of the distinction between orality and literacy. You may also be inclined to discount L?vi-Strauss's argument by recalling that he was sentimentally disposed toward the Nambikwara tribe and the other oral societies he studied. I leave the question very much an open issue. But Ricoeur's sentences prompt me to say that while we admire the new styles made possible by print and by the untethering of printed words from their origin in voice, the works of literature we most admire in the age of script and print are those which acknowledge the orality they may appear to have transcended. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Yeats, Joyce: none of these abandoned the ways of orality. Milton had his Muse. Blake was an engraver, a painter, a man of print, but his words and designs were responsive to a prophetic voice. Benjamin Franklin was a printer, but the sentences he wrote have their origin and point in a rhetorical tradition still predicated on the oral persuasion of person to person, preacher to congregation.15 But now the question is: what about the electronic media, the world of computers and information technology? If the technology of print enforced its values but still in some degree has allowed voices to be heard, surely?it may be argued?the electronic media will be even more hospitable to voices? Isn't TV almost entirely voice and body? Aren't e-mail and Internet a constant exchange of voices? Surely orality must come into its own again? The prudent answer, I think, is: not necessarily. What orality had to fear from script and print was the fate of being silenced, its values displaced. What it has to fear from the electronic media is the abjection of being teased and mocked. Walter Ong is again helpful on this question. He calls the present age, so far as it is governed by electronic developments, an age of "secondary orality." He means that the condi tions provided by electronic technology are similar to those of primary orality?the orality of an oral society?in superficial respects, but different in profound respects. They are similar, in that the events we witness are oral, and are suffused by oral elucidation; but they are different, in that TV merely mimes orality, displays simulations of spontaneity, and pretends to show social formations as open and permeable. According to the pattern of consequence he has already indicated, Ong expects to see the institutions of this secondary orality causing the production, least in the short term, of more books than ever; This content downloaded from 207.46.13.126 on Sat, 24 Sep 2016 05:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 158 NEW LITERARY HISTORY but these books will more and more clearly submit to the values of the new media. I suppose he means that most of the books on the best-seller list will be parasitic upon TV programs. I think we see that already. Perhaps Ong means that increasingly writers will write as if for TV, or to reach a readership of people accustomed to the situations and the dialogue we see and hear on TV. And presumably readers will gradually come to insist upon the styles and the conventions they see on TV. This seems probable to me. Every new technique, from the printing press to photography, film, tape, video, and computer games has had some impact upon the common understanding of the world. Those of us who grew up into a literature still open to the reception of voices are likely to be bewildered, perhaps dismayed, by further developments. But all is not lost. I have been much encouraged by one of the arguments in de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. He acknowledges that at any given moment a particular system of power is in place, a syntax of social and political practice. But he claims that nevertheless people engage in local ruses and tactics "that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop."16 That is to say: local and individual practices do not fully yield to the system of power that for the most part controls them. Instead, they feature constant sleights-of-hand, bouts of opportunism, inventive trickery. De Certeau speaks of these tactics as constituting an art of powerless people, those who live under an alien god whom, in small ways, they can disable or circumvent. I end with these few speculations. In the electronic age we are all powerless: power is in other hands. But we can still practice what de Certeau calls tactics, diversionary exercises, ruses. Perhaps these are what we should be teaching our students: tactics of evasion, the skill of detecting simulacra presented to us as real. We might teach our students the art of irony and train them to note discrepancies between one image and another, or between an image and its official discourse. In such an undertaking we might practice what Stanley Cavell calls "aversive thinking," following Emerson who in "Self-Reliance" says: "The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion."17 Aversive thinking about the age of screen proposes a critical relation to the world we live in and the instruments by which power is exerted. If we want a motto for this, apart from Emerson's phrase, I offer Kenneth Burke's account, in Counter Statement and other books, of the aim of literature and criticism alike, aesthetically considered: to prevent a society from becoming too com pletely, too hopelessly, itself.